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Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

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Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#121

Post by wott »

bcook wrote: post #54
tobz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity: how many bad interviews, or interviews with a rejection at the end, have you had in a row? Or total?

Zero(?), but I have also never had a "great" job that I had to fight for. Regardless, I think everyone knows through experience that an employee's technical skills are practically useless if said worker is socially inept.

And what are your social skills? You, who can't even see that the "fuck you, I quit" attitude does not come up first out of nothing but after a series of rejection and nonsensical situations, i.e. that it is a consequence of successive experiences and not the reason of these experiences. You, who decide unilaterally from your failure to understand the logic of events in a blog post, that the blogger is once and for all "socially inept". Great social skills without a bit of understanding and empathy, no doubt.

Gee, I am also very tired of people for which stuff went well, and think it is be the same for others. Can't you even imagine there is a variety of situations out there? Can't you imagine it may happen to you one day? Do you think people who encounter this kind of problems never had a shiny position earlier, and their "social skills" were considered perfect before some conceited internet stranger decided they were "socially inept"?

And you dare to talk about "experience", seriously?

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#122

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

ts330 wrote: post #26

Considering that it's our fellow programmers doing the interviewing, I'd say we're failing ourselves here. I'd wager that in almost all cases, those doing interviews have had zero training on effectively recruiting anyone (let alone other developers). An effective interview requires preparation - and I bet the majority of developers do this right between saying " fuck , have they arrived already?" and starting the in…

I guess the take-home lesson here is that programmers have no idea what makes a good programmer and how to screen for one. So they fall back to the basics, CS 101.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#123

Post by _clhx »

stocktech wrote: post #85
yownie wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring IS broken, unfortunately everyone isn't realizing it simultaneously, so half of us end up speaking about it to the other half who are already employed and feel the need to justify their employment. Since these discussions never happen out of CS / IT circles they very rarely propogate upwards to changing company practices unless the CTO/CEO happens to read HN. You're just further contributing to the rigged scen…

When the author himself describes very positive and negative interviewing experiences, yet having no success at either, I have a hard time blaming the hiring practices.

An interview can be positive and not lead to a job.

I went on a lot of interviews (maybe close to 100) before starting my own business, and I'd say at least 9/10 of them were very positive.

By positive: I felt we both left the interview a bit happier than we went in. We both had a legitimate good time, and enjoyed it. It wasn't a grind, both people got to know each other.

I'd say I had a 10% offer rate. The most common "why didn't you select me?" follow up answer I got was "we need someone who is an expert in XYZ language." Sometimes it was even that they need someone who is an expert in ABC library (when I was already pretty-much an expert in the language.)

The ones that did lead to job offers I didn't want after the interview.

The other 1/10 was because they had me take an IQ test, or do some really super long project, or meet with literally all 20 people in the company, or they made me sit in the lobby for 2 hours past the meeting time.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#124

Post by bcook »

tobz wrote: post #98
bcook wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero(?), but I have also never had a "great" job that I had to fight for. Regardless, I think everyone knows through experience that an employee's technical skills are practically useless if said worker is socially inept.

Sure, but what I was trying to get at is: if you had a string of interviews that felt "bad", and/or rejections, that you would probably be a little sour, and that's what I get from the article. It doesn't strike me that the author is particularly socially inept. As someone who watched previous coworkers, who are older, go through the interview ringer, I can sympathize with the author on the pigeonhole one can get stu…

I guess my confusion stems from the article's lack of a conclusion. Yes, _blank_ is sub-optimal, but how did you overcome the obstacle?

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#125

Post by falcolas »

Scea91 wrote: post #64
yownie wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring IS broken, unfortunately everyone isn't realizing it simultaneously, so half of us end up speaking about it to the other half who are already employed and feel the need to justify their employment. Since these discussions never happen out of CS / IT circles they very rarely propogate upwards to changing company practices unless the CTO/CEO happens to read HN. You're just further contributing to the rigged scen…

Hiring in CS / IT is massively more objective compared to most of other fields.

Not really - these kinds of interviews are about hiring "People Like Us", i.e. recent college CS graduates who the interviewers like right off the bat (are they going to strongly recommend someone they don't like). It discourages diversity, reinforces ageism, and creates a stagnation in the company doing the hiring.

I've seen this directly happen - the interviewers were two Asian and one White male, who came to this job as their first outside college. Looking over the engineering department, I saw, with one exception in fourty, young White or Asian males. The one exception was a lone Asian female, who had a doctorate in CS.

Hiring "People Like Us" doesn't help a company.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#126

Post by splicer »

Whenever I interview someone, I try to follow these principles:

1) Simulate a real work environment. This means a dev machine with full access to the web. One thing I'm looking for is how good the candidate is a finding information they don't know.

2) Customize the questions for the job at hand. A software tools dev is a very different position a firmware dev. I wouldn't, for instance, expect a firmware dev to know much about regular expressions. And I wouldn't expect someone interviewing for a scripting job to know much about alignment on ARM.

3) Test your questions on coworkers and friends. You need to get a baseline. Is there enough time to answer the question? Are people coming up with wide spectrum of solutions, or do you keep seeing the same response over an over? Are there parts of the problem that people find unclear?

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#127

Post by Grue3 »

I'd rather solve programming puzzles all day long, but every time I do an interview I get asked incredibly specific questions about a particular technology that can only be remembered by rote memorisation and can easily be Googled. That is, if I even get to the technical interview part.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#128

Post by odonnellryan »

Scea91 wrote: post #96
unprepare wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IT (By IT I'm talking about my industry, I'm an IT administrator, not programming) hiring is based a lot on certifications, certifications which are abundantly easy to scam. You can find full exams with answers of CCNA and every Microsoft cert imaginable, I've worked for companies that incentivise certifications, and i watched coworkers use these 'tools' en masse to gain easy pay bumps and pad their resumes. I've had…

None of the employees I would consider working for gives f k about certifications. I agree with you that certifications are crap but I haven't encountered a single good company that cares about them.

It's not true. Some companies legitimately care about them: if you are an MSP it is very useful to have people with Cisco, MS, and other certs.

Sometimes it is almost required (see MS certs) to be competitive.

So, they only care because it's a business thing (not a qualification thing) but they do care.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#129

Post by mikearagua »

unoti wrote: post #93

Google and similar companies aren't for everyone. They're looking for people on top of their game and willing to go the extra mile. > To be fair, I already knew about Google’s idiotic interview process that is optimized for hiring book-smart academic candidates who know their algorithms and data structures cold, so my expectations were rather low to begin with. I also did not get much sleep that day, so my problem so…

So true, this is the advice I give people interviewing for tech companies and a list of the sorts of things they'll want you to know off the top of your head. If that's what you want, that's what you'll need to do.

That being said, though Google has contacted me a few times for an interview, I've never gone through with it mostly because I'm not that interested. I hear from a good friend who worked there that Google is full of "algorithms walking around looking for a problem" and as much as I like programming and problem solving I hate it when its lost sight of serving a human need and I skew strongly toward the experimentalist side (https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/dec/essay.criticize.html) of this whole thing we do.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#130

Post by cwilkes »

mkozlows wrote: post #72
robbiemitchell wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think about OP's comments that the algorithm questions were unrelated to the front-end positions?

Of course they're unrelated. The interviewer asking this doesn't expect you to write these algorithms all day, they want to know that you have the basic mental dexterity to figure things like this out. They are, ideally, abstracted problems of the complexity that you'd be expected to be able to solve on your own. There are some positions where you don't have to care if people can really problem-solve; as long as they…

They aren't asking those questions to see if you have mental dexterity. They are asking them as they asked hundreds of people that same question before and kid themselves to thinking it is an objective measure as, well, everyone working at the company passed it and everyone here is a 10xer and so if you don't pass it you are a loser.
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